Tag Archives: Light of Day Canada

A reader called me the old fashioned way the other day, on the telephone, to tell me that I must answer the questions I left dangling in SPPP No. 2. I hate that because it is a lot easier to ask questions than to answer them. Well, here are my answers.

Question: Are there any songs about bleak towns?

Answer: Yes, but my two favourites are both by Bruce Springsteen,My Hometown and Death to my Hometown with its compelling Celtic rhythm and lyrics accusing and convicting corporate power of bringing certain death to his hometown without the use of guns or bombs and without penalty. Released in 2012 Death to my Hometown updates My Hometown, which presciently paints a poverty-stricken future from the vantage of 1984 economic and trade policies. Together these song-writing gems form a powerful political analysis spanning four decades. The analysis is bleak and is no longer “the future” but “the present” for many towns in Canada and the USA.

Question: My future’s so bleak I have to wear [fill In blank.]

Answer: [A SAD light.] Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a problem for many who live in northern climates. Long dark winters can cause general depression (winter blues) in some individuals. I believe my mother’s circadian rhythm was sensitive to changes in natural light living as she did in northern Manitoba where the average hours of sunlight decrease from 280 in June to 85 in December and in central Saskatchewan where the decrease from an average of 375 hours in June to 75 hours in December is even more striking. SAD lights are an attempt to mimic natural sunlight alleviating symptoms for suffers.

As a slogan or hook, “I have to wear a SAD light” is an utter failure as it fails to tickle whimsy or to stir the body and mind to overcome adversity. Perhaps manufacturers and retailers of SAD lights will be happy but I just don’t see the marketing attraction myself. The bleakness in Springsteen’s passionate lyrics and music can be overcome only by changing the balance of class power as intersected by the politics of the struggle for fundamental human rights.

Question: Did I choose the path with Parkinson’s or did it choose me?

Answer: No one in his or her right mind would take an oath of fealty to Parkinson’s disease if s/he had even half an idea of what that would entail. Parkinson’s is an insidious disease that slowly and surely sucks life and independence from you and does not have the decency to kill you. I am but one of over 100,000 Persons living with Parkinson’s (PwP) in Canada and while I have suffered from the predictable decline in health for a relatively short period of time compared to many others, I assure you that I am not being overly dramatic about its effects. Walk one day in my shoes ….

Question: What happened anyway?

Answer: An interconnected series of expected events and experiences that were to be my life were nudged off course and shunted to the sidelines by an unexpected series of events and experiences that became my life. It is a happy story except that Parkinson’s threatens to write a difficult ending.

Answer: In 1961 Gene Pitney’s Town Without Pity was riding a wave of middle class economic prosperity. Love and the politics of the Vietnam War were at the centre of teenage angst. The hollowing out of the American industrial heartland that spawned Springsteen’s two ‘hometown’ songs was not yet upon us. That is not to say that Town Without Pity was shallow but it is to say that the dialectic between capital and labour was not manifest as class politics in the 1960s and frankly has been barely on the radar since then. US President Trump’s election unearthed an irreverent populism with ad hoc nationalist and dictatorial tendencies. In Canada we have emerged from a decade of right wing politics to embrace once again the soft middle. If we are honest, the political mood in both countries is closer to Town Without Pity than it is to Bruce Springsteen and Death to my Hometown.

Another reason I like Springsteen: he has made 11 “surprise” appearances at the main concert of the Light of Day Foundation, which has raised more than $4 million for Parkinson’s research over the 17 years of their winter festival in Asbury Park. See also Light of Day Canada.